20 years ago, he predicted Brexit, Twitter, and Trump

For the last few years, the name Manuel Castells kept popping up in things I read about digital media, social networks, and mass communications. He is a Spanish sociologist who spent much of his career at UC Berkeley.

Last year I began reading his "The Rise of the Network Society," the first of three volumes in a series "The Information Age." He wrote them two decades ago, but he seems to have predicted many of the trends we are living through now.

The free flow of money, information, and power through global networks means those networks, not nations, are the source of power, he wrote. Institutions, societies, and ethnic groups with rigid structures that cannot take advantage of these flows will be left behind.

He wrote a new preface for the 2010 edition, before the Arab Spring, before the Syrian civil war, before Brexit, before Trump. He pointed out that structural changes were taking place in society because large sections of the world's population were being excluded from the global networks that accumulate knowledge and wealth.

Highly educated elites from financial and technological centers were profiting from the flow of money and power, while the rest of the world was being left behind.

Twitter and Facebook spring Guatemalan man from prison

A Guatemalan lawyer was shot to death a few weeks ago and left a videotape that said if he was ever murdered, the president was responsible.

A few days later, a Twitter user sent out a “tweet” urging people to pull their money out of the bank named by the murdered lawyer as being tied in with the president and supposed corruption.

The Twitter-er was jailed for inciting financial panic, tweeted about his arrest, and a group formed in Facebook to raise money for his bail. He was out within hours.

Subverting the state-controlled media

Internet-based independent media and social networks are becoming an important force for freedom of expression around the world.

In many countries, the media are submissive to the government because of the amount of advertising revenue that comes from official sources. Media like Twitter and Facebook distribute news and comment from unofficial sources that formerly could be surpressed or ignored.

One of the reasons I´m optimistic about journalism and media on the Internet is this ability to circumvent all of the suppression of speech that authoritarian governments exert in nominal democracies.

I blogged on it on my journalism site.

How a headline ricochets around the Web

OK, this is an ego trip but it´s also about how information gets spread around these days on the web. In other words, you can run but you can´t hide. (Photo from El País)

At a digital journalism conference in Huesca, Spain, I made one comment that a journalist for El País, Spain´s top daily, thought was notable and which got put into a headline: “We journalists have been arrogant (and haven´t listened to citizen journalists and readers)“.

Links to Facebook, Twitter, blogs
Journalists in Spain and Mexico linked it to their blogs and Facebook accounts and sent out Twitters with links to it. It ricocheted all over the place in cyberspace. In context, the quote is probably not as provocative, but in a headline it really grabs attention. Thank goodness it wasn´t something worse...

Here´s the link, with a photo

Heraldo de Aragón published an interview with me


Another article by a digital journalism site in Spain


An audio recording of my comments was published by someone here.


A newspaper in Chiapas, Mexico, reproduced the interview with Heraldo.


A mention in a blog


This is a decent summary of other presenters


Me on YouTube at the huesca conference; funny, I minute of question and 5 seconds of my response. My reaction is to the comment by the moderator that he was going to ask me a “provocative” question.